Family

CHICAGO — It's been eight years since her then-pimp took Nicole to a North Side Chicago parlor and paid $60 to have her branded on her neck with a horseshoe tattoo and tiny letters underneath spelling "Productions."

Ever since, she wrapped her long curly hair around her neck to hide the mark, the size of a dollar coin. If someone still caught a glimpse, she tried to explain it away with a tale about a former boyfriend who produced music. If anyone mistook it for the Gemini zodiac sign, she played along.

Earlier this month, Nicole, 26, sat in a sunny kitchen, her head tilted slightly so that Chris Baker could direct an intense light on the tattoo.

Like a dentist's drill, the whir from the machine the tattoo artist held in his hand was bracing.

"It burns." She winced slightly when she felt the heat.

"It burns," she said again.

Nicole's pimp was sentenced to life in prison last month - an unusually harsh punishment from a federal judge making a statement about the insidious nature of pimping. At the sentencing, U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman told Alex Campbell that branding his victims was the worst thing he did to them. Physical pain heals, the judge said. But the tattoos would remain forever, a permanent reminder of what they had endured.

Former prostitutes have struggled with this for decades — how to build a new life with a glaring, constant reminder of a low, shameful time — but tattoo removal is not always an easy option. It can be time-consuming and expensive — and typically survivors are more focused on emotional and mental healing.

But days after Campbell's sentencing and Gettleman's sharp remarks on the branding were publicized, Nicole was contacted by Baker, a Christian minister with an unusual calling. Also an Oswego, Ill., tattoo artist, Baker has created a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the removal of gang and trafficking tattoos. He offered a free removal to any of Campbell's victims.

"It's something I thought would never happen," said Nicole, sitting at her kitchen table earlier this month. "I get no more questions. I can wear what I want. Wear my hair as I want. My kids won't ever have to ask me.

"It means a divorce. It means I'm no longer his property. It means a lot."

Nicole escaped from Campbell in 2007. Federal prosecutors contend Campbell, who owned massage parlors, victimized as many as 20 women, beating and forcing them in prostitution, renaming many of them and branding them with some version of his "Cowboy" nickname. He was convicted in January on forced labor, sex trafficking and extortion charges.

Even after leaving the pimp, Nicole, who no longer lives in Chicago and asked that her last name and new town not be printed, initially continued to work as an exotic dancer. She learned the trade through Campbell, and it meant steady income.

But last summer she felt a dramatic pull toward her Christian faith and decided she could no longer do it. She has traded that life to focus on her faith, children, her schooling, and now, helping victims of trafficking.

She is working at her local Goodwill while also volunteering with an anti-trafficking group. She is applying for a volunteer advocate position at a local police department. She is enrolled in an online college, where she hopes to study social work.

Several months ago, federal agents who investigated Campbell asked her to tell her story to the judge at sentencing to make sure he fully understood the extent of Campbell's crimes. Although acknowledged by federal prosecutors as one of Campbell's victims, Nicole's case was not part of the criminal trial.

In a calm voice she told a chaotic, torturous story of Campbell's abuse to her and other women, of his threats and manipulations.

The force of testifying didn't hit her until the next day, when she found herself feeling sad, remembering how, as a teenage runaway from a fractured family who faced criminal charges back home, she accepted Campbell's offer for lunch when he pulled up next to her on a Chicago street in 2004.

"I started thinking of why I got to the place where I allowed that man to do what he did," she said. "I am happy with the sentence he got. But it just doesn't change my past. It doesn't change what happened. It doesn't change anything. It just kind of opened another door to something I have to bring closure to."

Two weeks after the sentencing, Baker trained a bright, intense light on Nicole's neck, illuminating the horseshoe. The procedure to remove the mark took less than five minutes. The ink in her neck would break down from the intense heat and her system would flush it out, Baker told her.

Close friends from Nicole's church stood in her living room watching, and crying, as Baker worked.

Baker, whose arms and legs are covered in tattoos, said he has removed some 500 tattoos through is organization. Most of his work has been with gang members, but after learning about the plight of trafficking victims he reached out to federal authorities to offer his services.

"Any time I can get rid of a trafficking tattoo is a good day," Baker said as he worked on Nicole's tattoo. "Trafficking is not a choice people make."

In January, Illinois law will change to expand the definition of how a sex trafficker uses psychological means to control a victim, including the use of branding, said Lynne Johnson, the policy and advocacy director for the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation.

"The old laws over-emphasize the role of physical force," said Johnson, who said the state statutes are coming in line with existing federal laws. "(Traffickers) are more subtle than that. They are using schemes, plans and patterns. (The new law) allows prosecutors to fit branding in with the concept of ownership. It can have the intended consequence . to cause psychological harm. Loss of hope. You have no other options. I own you."

Though she may still question her own choices at times, Nicole firmly understands Johnson's point. As much as Campbell beat her, he also tricked her into thinking he could give her something she hadn't had much of before — love. And he exploited that.

But perhaps because she had cried out to law enforcement before, Nicole never really believed that anyone else could understand how it all happened.

That was until she heard Gettleman speak about the tattoos and how Campbell permanently scarred his victims.

It was at that moment in the sentencing that Nicole's tough exterior cracked just a bit.

"I started to cry," she said. "But I was happy. Because he got it. I was afraid he wasn't going to understand. But then the judge said he did."

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